One of the many poets often referred to as 'a poet's poet', Jean Follain has never quite done it for me, but I took to this one (mildly meddled with):

October Thoughts

Nothing beats

an old wine

savoured alone

as early evening

coppers the hills,

no huntsman now

drawing a bead

on the beasts of the
plain.

Our friends’ sisters

(the radio bleats

of wars to come)

look lovelier

(an insect settles

and moves on again).

Another Callimachus:

Melanippus

Melanippus, who sold smack to schoolkids,

did the world a favour this morning,

dying from a seizure. Young Basha

followed after lunch by her own hand.

Having laid out her brother it seems

she lay down herself and saw no reason

to get up again. Their fond father's

vacant house is crushed on two sides

like a nut. We are sorry for him,

up to a point. Had he no warning?

One thing he must know only too well:

both his darlings are ticketed to hell.

Milo de Angelis has some claim to be top living Italian poet, and has already been translated into English, or at least American, including I think (somewhere on the net) this poem from Tema dell'addio (2006)

Milo
de Angelis

Non
è più dato

It's
no longer an option. The weeping that morphed

into
uncontrolled laughter, the nights spent

beating
Via Crescenzago, homing in on the neon

of
a news-stand. No longer an option. No longer

ours,
that breathless waiting for midnight, waiting

for
her until midnight tune up its turmoil,

its
hours of delirium, all the hours through to daybreak.

No
longer an option. Just the one lifetime,

one
death, too few the obsessions, too few

our
nights of love, the kisses, too few the streets

that
led away from ourselves, too few the poems.

A late Szymborska:

Mirror

Yes, I remember that wallin our ruined city. A blockgutted almost to the sixth floor.a mirror on the fourth,

unbelievably intact, stillresolutely attached.

It reflected no one's face now,no hands tilted a hat,there was no door opposite,nothing you could calla room, or a flat.

And so, like every well made thing,it worked on irreproachably,with a professional want of surprise.

An attempt at one of my all time favourites, from Le Occasioni

Dora Markus

It was where the wooden pier at Porto Corsini

thrusts out into open sea

and solitary men, hardly seeming to move,

cast and retrieve their nets. With a vague hand

you gestured to your real country

on the other, invisible shore,

and we followed the canal downtown

to the docks in their sheen of soot

where a stagnant Spring ebbed away

unmourned.

And here where a sweet middle-eastern unease

perturbs the centuried calm,

your talk glittered like the scales

of their basketed catch.

Your restlessness recalls

those birds of passage that dash

against the harbour lighthouse

on hurricane nights:

tempestuous too your allure

that simmers without seeming

(and how rare its abeyance).

I don't understand how it is

you contrive to survive

in that lake of indifference, your heart.

Is it your talisman saves you,

- the one that you keep with your

nail-file, your lipstick, your powderpuff:

that miniature ivory mouse?

Is he your secret?!

Eugenio Montale

One from Philippe Jaccottet's first book L'Effraie (Gallimard, 1953)

Interior

A long time I've been trying to live a life here,in this room I pretend to be fond of,the table's unthreatening clutter, the windowthat opens each dawn onto altered greenery,a blackbird's heart ticking in the dark ivy,light-splinters throwing quaint shadows everywhere.

I make myself believe it's a milder day than most,I'm at home, and the morning bodes well.There is just this spider, at the foot of the bed(because of the garden), I can't have stampedon her adequately, she seems busy stillsetting her nets to enmesh my frail ghost . . .

and another:

Portovenere

The sea is dark again. You understand - don't you? - it's our very last night. But who am I calling?Beyond my own echo, I'm talking to no-one, to no-one.Round the tumbled rocks the sea is black, and tolls in its cloche of rain. A lone batbangs off the bars of air in its startled flight,all our days are equally lost, shreddedby black wings; these waters, their predictablegrandeur, leave me cold, though I'm still here talking,not to you, not to anything. Let them founder,these 'fine days'. I'll go, I'll continue to age, who's counting?The sea knows well enough to shut the door at our back.

Changing millennia, two after (quite a long way after) Callimachus:

Argonauta Argo

I was once a prodigious egotistical seashell,goddess of promontories, and now I'm all yours,on yours, since Selenea offered me up.

Oh once I was an argonaut, the song goes,argonauta argo, I was a paper nautilus,and when there was wind I waved my arms

like little sails, scudding the seas,so Aristotle thought, wrongly of course,and Callimachus who might have known better.

When a glassy calm, a calm of glass, prevailed, and the nereid smiled idly over the ocean,I rowed lustily with my tentacles,

I lived into my name, until I was finally beached on a beach at Kea in the Cyclades and had surely been kakavia

by daybreak were I not old and chewy;and now, and now, I'm a bauble in your temple,Arsinoë, I'm an empty envelope,

any message of love I bore an ago agocried through and lost, no longer a nest evenfor halcyon foundlings (oh I've suffered

immodesties in my time I've seen things).Look kindly, goddess, on the prayersof Clinia's daughter, there's a deal of good in her,

- in the way her skirt swings as she corners the agora - and she comes from Aeolian Smyrna.

Where the Girls Are

My mirror-half is lost, my egregious twin,and all four-handed chores without himare tedious: folding the sheets, for one.Could be from sheer ennui he's just gonedown to the foreshore and had done with it;else he's ensnared in some barely licitliason. My tart neighbour insinuateshe's snuffling around the jailbait,the gym, the Sappho Centre, the Eve Bar,wherever it is the girls are,being all gentlemanly and helpfulwith their duffel-bags. The fat cop whose amblethat is (beat's too sprightly) has promisedto send him home if sighted; the boy's missed.

Silvia won't you help me? We know,don't we, what he's at, trawling the meat showsthe singles dives, the drive-ins - asking for trouble?No hanging offence, you'll say, in these parts.But why scan only the callous hearts?He's out there, Silvia, looking for your double.